The Love in Public Project
"Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”
- Cornel West
In 2019, with a group of ten participants, I turned this quote from Cornel West into a question to hold, explore, and contemplate: What does love in public look like?
As a dharma practitioner, I've spent a great deal of time contemplating love, compassion and liberation. All these things have become much bigger for me than the dictionary definitions we can find of them. Especially love. Love is too often spoken about in a conditioned way because that is too often how it is given. There is a sense that we must earn love, or that love is only possible through familial or romantic ties. But in the Buddhist context, and many spiritual contexts, love is limitless and all-encompassing.
This is at the core of my response to the question of what love looks like in public, but it remained a little abstract. I wanted to connect in this practice with others on a deep, grounded level of how we move through the world, the things we say and do, the choices we make on where to spend our money, and how we cultivate connections with folks we interact with on a daily basis.
Over the course of a year we did just that, and each participant shared with me their growing understanding of justice, and the ways they saw this particular expression of love in the world and in themselves. At the end of the year, I gathered our collective learning together into a 'zine, of which I printed a limited quantity—45 copies with three different covers.
I am now making it available in PDF format, and invite you to share it far and wide.
As a dharma practitioner, I've spent a great deal of time contemplating love, compassion and liberation. All these things have become much bigger for me than the dictionary definitions we can find of them. Especially love. Love is too often spoken about in a conditioned way because that is too often how it is given. There is a sense that we must earn love, or that love is only possible through familial or romantic ties. But in the Buddhist context, and many spiritual contexts, love is limitless and all-encompassing.
This is at the core of my response to the question of what love looks like in public, but it remained a little abstract. I wanted to connect in this practice with others on a deep, grounded level of how we move through the world, the things we say and do, the choices we make on where to spend our money, and how we cultivate connections with folks we interact with on a daily basis.
Over the course of a year we did just that, and each participant shared with me their growing understanding of justice, and the ways they saw this particular expression of love in the world and in themselves. At the end of the year, I gathered our collective learning together into a 'zine, of which I printed a limited quantity—45 copies with three different covers.
I am now making it available in PDF format, and invite you to share it far and wide.
